RIGHT TO PROTECT INTERESTS AND INDUSTRY 157 



perceive that it never occurred to the United States Government or its 

 eminent representatives to claim, far less to the British Government to 

 concede, nor to any diplomatist or writer, either in 1783 or 1815, to con- 

 ceive, that these fisheries, extending far beyond and outside of any 

 limit of territorial jurisdiction over the sea that ever was asserted there 

 or elsewhere, were the general property of mankind, or that a partici- 

 pation in them was a part of the liberty of the open sea. If that prop- 

 osition could have been maintained, the right of the Americans would 

 have been plain and clear. No treaty stipulations would have been 

 necessary at the end of either war. (See also Wharton's Dig. vol. in, 

 pp. 39-48.) 



It will be perceived, also, that in the case of these fisheries there was 

 no pretense that an exclusion of the world from, participating in them 

 outside the line of the littoral sea was necessary to their preservation, 

 or that such participation would tend to their extinction; though un- 

 questionably it might lead to a diminution of the profits to be derived 

 from them by the inhabitants of the territory to which they appertained. 



If the countries now contending were right then in the views enter- 

 tained by both governments and by all who were concerned for them, 

 in cabinets, diplomacy, Congress, and Parliament, and in the claims 

 then made, conceded and acted upon ever since, the precedent 

 thus established must be decisive between them in the present case. 

 There can not be one international law for the Atlantic and another 

 for the Pacific. If the seals may be treated, like the fish, as only ferce 

 naturte, and not property, if the maintenance of the herd in the 

 Pribilof Islands is only a fishery, how then can the case be distin- 

 guished from that of the fisheries of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland 1 

 Why would it not be, until conceded away by treaty or thrown open 

 to the world by consent, a proprietary right belonging to the territory 

 to which it appertains, and which the Government has a right to 

 defend! 



But the case of the seal industry is far stronger than that of the 

 fisheries in favor of such a right. The great facts of the nature of 

 the animals, their attachment to the land, without which they could not 

 exist, their constant animus revertendi, the protection there, in default 

 of which they would perish, and the absolute necessity of excluding 

 outside interference with them, in order to prevent their extinction, not 

 only greatly strengthen the proprietary title, but annex to it the 

 further and unquestionable right of self-defense, in respect to those 



